NetBSD/xen available for Multi-Processor machines

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

*** NetBSD/xen available for Multi-Processor machines

The NetBSD Foundation is pleased to announce completion of
Multiprocessing Support for the port of its Open Source Operating
System to the Xen hypervisor.

The NetBSD Fundation started the Xen MP project 8 month ago; the goal
was to add SMP support to NetBSD/Xen domU kernels. This project has
officially completed, and after a few bug fixes in the pmap(9) code it
is now considered stable on both i386 and amd64. NetBSD 6.0 will ship
with option MULTIPROCESSOR enabled by default for Xen domU kernels.

The availability of Xen MP support in NetBSD allows to run the NetBSD
Open Source Operating Systems on a range of available infrastructure
providers' systems. Amazon's Web Services with their Elastic Cloud
Computing is a prominent examples here.

Xen is a virtualization software that enables several independent
operating system instances ("domains") to run concurrently on the same
computer hardware. The hardware is managed by the first domain (dom0),
and further guest/user domains (domU) are spawned and managed by dom0.
Operating systems available for running as dom0 and domU guests
include Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Linux besides NetBSD.

NetBSD is a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open
Source operating system. It is available for a wide range of
platforms, from large-scale servers and powerful desktop systems to
handheld and embedded devices. Its clean design and advanced features
make it excellent for use in both production and research
environments, and the source code is freely available under a
business-friendly license. NetBSD is developed and supported by a
large and vivid international community. Many applications are readily
available through pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection.

NetBSD has been available for the Xen hypervisor since Xen 1 and
NetBSD 2.0, released in 2004 , but until now only a single
processor was supported in each NetBSD/xen domain. 

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%NetBSD.org@localhost>
--